Life Is Funny (23 page)

Mickey's rolling around on the cream rug with blue trim. He's laughing so hard he's shouting. “Mari
juana
!” he shouts. “Mari
juana
!”

*  *  *

“We've got some news about your mother,” my mom says at dinner. Across from me I see the hatchet man come back. He hasn't been around as much lately, but now it's like he never left. Mickey catches it, too. He puts his fork down and looks up, all eyes and worry lines.

“She's finished four months in a program and hopes to finish another eight. She's planning on asking for custody of Mickey after that.”

“Do you understand, Mickey?” my father asks.

“No,” Mickey says.

“Mama want you back in a while,” Eric explains, short and mad.

“What about Eric?” I ask my parents.

He stares straight ahead.

“We're not sure,” my mother says to him, reaching out her hand to touch his.

He jerks back and goes stiff as a statue. Only his mouth moves. “Don't matter,” Eric tells us. “She not going to be clean that long.”

“We going back with Mama soon?” Mickey asks.

“Nah,” Eric says. My father rips at his napkin.

“My mama dead?” Mickey asks my parents.

“Not dead,” my father finally answers. He gathers a small pile of confetti on his plate. “Just sick.”

“Eric,” my mother says, sounding like she used to, making my heart take notice with hard little blinks, “I see the whole world come in and out of my job every day. I see everything. I see the good and I see the evil.”

Eric's face stays fixed, like a mask.

“Your mother's fighting a war out there. That war got her so young she's been fighting since before you were a thought.”

My mom waits a second, while I beg her, in my head, not to stop.

“Evil comes in lots of different ways,” she goes on. “It's got your mother by the throat, it's all tangled up inside her, and it's not her fault she can't shake it out.”

Eric pushes out Jackson's chair and stands up. I don't want him to go. When he does, my mother will stop talking. She'll disappear again, with him.

“It's not your fault either,” my mother tells his back, as he stomps out of the room.

*  *  *

I watch Eric pull on his T-shirt and jeans and shoes. Through the keyhole I see him pull up the covers over Mickey and then walk out the door. From my bedroom window, I watch Eric disappear into the darkness of our quiet street. I set myself up on the stairs in the foyer.

I fall asleep in a nest of blankets, and when I wake up, it's because Eric's leaning down in my face, shaking me.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Shut up,” he says. He pulls me by the shoulder out of the foyer into the living room. His hand is huge and cold. He lets go of me to plop down on the couch. The clock over the TV says it's four-thirteen a.m. I'm not supposed to be alone with him. My parents made that rule on the first day, after the first dinner. That was forever ago, when the snow was just starting, clean and neat, not melted into the little gray lumps lining the edges of our driveway now.

“Where did you go?” I ask.

“Had to get me some weed,” he says. He pulls out a hand-rolled cigarette—a blunt—and a lighter. In a second the end of the blunt glows orange and brown.

“You'll get into trouble,” I tell him.

“Shut up,” he says, and he takes the blunt from his mouth, holds it in his thumb and first finger, and passes it to me.

“I don't know how,” I say.

“Why this shit scare you so bad?” he asks me. “Only make you be relax.”

“It doesn't scare me,” I lie.

He rolls his eyes. “You is a trip,” he says.

“Don't make fun of me.”

He tries to hand me the blunt again. This time I take it.

“Hold up,” he says. He goes to the kitchen. I hear him fill a glass with water. He comes back and sets the glass on the coffee table.

“It going to burn you. Breathe in and then drink this fast.”

I hold the blunt to my mouth and breathe in. It catches my throat on fire, and I choke. It's hard to gulp at the glass, but the water helps. I hand the blunt back to Eric. He sucks without letting his lips touch it and then holds his mouth closed for a long time.

“Who that?” he asks after a while. Smoke curls out from his nose. It makes him look like a dragon. He's staring at a picture of my brother on the mantel.

“That's Jackson,” I tell him. It's strange to say his name out loud. It's strange to notice his picture. I forgot it was there. I forgot about his black baseball cap with the orange X, and his gold ball earring in his right ear, and that squint smirk he used to have.

“How long you keep him?” Eric asks. He thinks Jackson was another foster kid. The idea makes me stop breathing for a second.

“Asked you a question,” Eric says, leaning back and closing his eyes. I know he's mocking me from that day in the snow.

“Don't make fun of me,” I tell him again. He still has the blunt in his hand, and I'm afraid he might burn the couch, so I take it from him and hold it over my water glass.

“Who it be?” he asks again.

“My brother,” I say.
That's my brother.
Eric opens his eyes and sits up a little.

“You got a real brother?” I thought he knew.

“He died,” I say. Eric takes the blunt back and sucks at it. His cheeks pull in, making him look skinny.

“How old he be when he die?” Eric asks me after a minute.

“Ten,” I tell him.
You always sit in his chair,
I want to say.

“He got shot?” Eric asks. I never knew anyone who got shot.

“No,” I answer. “He got sick.”

“You and him were tight?”

“I don't know.”

“Your mama cry?”

I shake my head.
On the inside, like me.
“Mostly my dad,” I tell him.

Eric thinks for a minute, and then he leans real close into my face. “You shitting me?” he asks.

It makes me remember something my mother always used to say.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but still, most of us tend to disbelieve truth before we'll question a lie.

“Nuh uh,” I tell him.

“For real, that your brother?” Eric asks me.

“For real.”

*  *  *

At the diner on Saturday my father brings it up.

“It's been almost three months,” he says.

“What?” I ask. I make designs with my finger on the outside of my Coke glass.

“The boys,” my mother tells me. “They've been with us for almost three months.”

“What's in your head?” my father asks.

“What's in yours?” I ask right back.

“We want them to stay awhile,” he says, “if that's okay with you.”

“Eric still smokes weed,” I tattle.

The waitress puts my hot fudge sundae smack in the middle of the paper place mat stained with french-fry grease. I feel full now. I'm sick of hot fudge sundaes anyway.

“ ‘Weed'?”
my father asks.

“And Mickey never sleeps in his own bed. They sleep together.”

“No tales, Linny,” my mother says.

I pick up the cherry by its stem and twirl it for a while. With its spot of whipped cream, it looks like a snow-capped Christmas ornament.

“Linny?” my father says.

“Okay,” I answer.

*  *  *

Mickey and Eric come to the cemetery with us the weekend before Easter. They didn't have to, but they wanted to. It's strange with them here, strange standing near them in the bright sun, watching them stare at Jackson's stone, tiny clusters of new purple crocus pushing up through the grass by their feet.

I don't want them to see my father cry. I don't want them messing up the picture I have in my head of our family. I don't want Jackson, wherever he is, to get confused.

*  *  *

Through the keyhole I can see Eric using his new pad and his new color chalk and oil crayons. I can see Mickey reading from Eric's marble dictation notebook. I can't hear every word, but I know what it says anyway:

Once upon a time there was a boy without a name. He lived in a mansion by the ocean. This boy had a unique talent. He could make himself disappear. He would make himself disappear when it was time to wash the dishes. He would make himself disappear when he wanted to take some candy from the store for his sick sister. He would make himself disappear when it was test time at school. He would make himself disappear when he wanted to hear what other people were saying. And sometimes he would make himself disappear just for the fun of disappearing. . . .

I watch for a while, and then I see Eric tear out the drawing from its pad, stand up from the bed, and walk toward me.

“Move,” Eric orders, through the keyhole, and I do, while he opens the door.

His hands and T-shirt are covered with chalk and oil colors. His hair is all snaky with half-grown dreadlocks. He doesn't look like a hatchet murderer anymore. He just looks like a regular lunatic.

“Here,” he says, shoving the picture at me.

It's the boy without a name. He's walking in a purple night on silver sand near a black ocean brightened by glowing white sea-foam. He's wearing jeans and a sweater, and he's holding a bag of red and white striped candy that glows like the sea-foam, and he's trailing a stick behind him, lazy. His legs and middle are sort of hard to see, but his shoulders and neck are a little clearer, because he disappears from the bottom up, and his light brown face and black baseball cap with the orange X and the gold ball earring and his squint smirk are clear as day.

“You got his eyes wrong,” I hear myself say to Eric, who shrugs and lights up a blunt.

Mickey pads over to the bathroom to see. He looks carefully, while I hold the picture out for him and lean hard against the sink.

“It nice,” he tells Eric. Then he stares up at me, all eyes and worry lines. “Why you crying?”

“I'm not,” I argue, my voice high and melting, my insides all unfrozen.

“Why she lie?” Mickey asks Eric.

Eric moves into their room, opens the window, and flops back on their bed.

“Don't worry about it none,” he tells Mickey. “Girls is crazy.”

Also by E. R. Frank

America

Friction

Wrecked

Dime

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 •
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• This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Text copyright © 2000 by E. R. Frank • Jacket illustration copyright © 2016 by Neil Swaab • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • Atheneum logo is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
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. • Interior design by Mike Rosamilia; jacket design and hand-lettering by Russell Gordon • First Atheneum hardcover edition May 2016 • Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Names: Frank, E. R., author. • Title: Life is funny / E.R. Frank. • Description: First Atheneum Books for Young Readers Hardcover Edition. | New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, [2016] | ?2000 | Summary: The lives of eleven teens of different races, economic backgrounds, and family situations living in Brooklyn, New York, become intertwined over a seven year period. • Identifiers: LCCN 2015025466 • ISBN 978-1-4814-3164-4 (hc) • ISBN 978-1-4814-3163-7 (pbk) • ISBN 978-1-4814-3165-1 (eBook) • Subjects: | CYAC: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / General (see also headings under Family). | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Friendship. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Adolescence. • Classification: LCC PZ7.F84913 Li 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 • LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025466